BAKER, Leo Kingsley (1898–1986), was born in London on 14 August 1898, the son of Laura Jane Baker and James Leopold Hawes. He was educated at St George’s School, Harpenden, from 1909 to 1917 where he was a school prefect, captain of rugby and of cricket. After matriculating at Wadham College, Oxford, in June 1917 he enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps. He was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant in November 1917, and a 1st lieutenant in April 1918. In May 1918 he went to France as a pilot with the 80th Squadron of the Royal Air Force. After being severely wounded in August 1918, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Baker returned to Oxford in 1919 and read Modern History. He and Lewis, who met soon after Baker arrived in Oxford, were drawn together by a love of poetry, and Lewis’s letters to Baker contain some of his most interesting observations on poetry. He was a frequent visitor at Lewis’s and Mrs Janie Moore’s* home, and there are many references to him in AMR. It was Leo Baker who introduced Owen Barfield*, also of Wadham, to Lewis.
After taking his BA in 1922, he was from 1922 to 1925 an actor with the Old Vic Company under Lilian Baylis. His experience included parts in 30 Shakespeare plays, some old comedy, and two years of stage management. In 1925 he married Eileen Brookes and they had three daughters, Susan Mary (b. 1930), Elizabeth Margaret (b. 1933), and Rachel Mary Rosalind (b. 1939). Baker gave up the theatre owing to troubles resulting from his war wounds, and he and his wife set up a handloom weaving business in Chipping Campden, known as the Kingsley Weavers. It was dissolved on the outbreak of the Second World War. He was an Anthroposophist, and in 1933 he became a priest with the Anthroposophical ‘Christian Community’. After the war broke out he took the family out of London to Gloucester, where he taught at a Rudolf Steiner school. He left the school in 1942 to become drama adviser for Gloucestershire, and in 1946 he became national drama adviser for the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust.
Upon his retirement at 65 he became head of acting for the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in Sidcup, having been the chairman of governors when it was founded. His final retirement was at the age of 72. His wife suffered a severe stroke in 1976 and for five and a half years he devotedly visited her in hospital every day. She was paralysed and unable to speak. Leo Baker died on 5 September 1986 at the age of 88, his intellectual faculties as bright as ever.
BARFIELD, Owen (1898–1997) was born in Muswell Hill, North London on 9 November 1898, the youngest of four children, two sons and two daughters, born to Arthur Edward Barfield and Elizabeth (Shoults) Barfield. His father was a solicitor and his mother an ardent feminist. Both of his parents had been born Congregationalists, but the family observed no religion. When he was eight, Owen Barfield joined his brother Harry at Highgate School, and it was there he met one of his greatest friends, Cecil Harwood.* During the First World War he served mainly in Belgium as a wireless officer in the signal service of the Royal Engineers–now the Royal Corps of Signals. The wireless (or radio) was at that time in its infancy, and still using the Morse code.
In October 1919 he went up to Wadham College, Oxford, on a Classical scholarship. However, because of his growing interest in English literature, it was not Greats he read, but English Literature. During his first term he met Lewis and they were friends from then on. ‘Barfield towers above us all’, Lewis wrote in his diary of 9 July 1922. Lewis’s diary (AMR), which covers the years 1922 to 1927, contains much about their shared interests.
After taking his BA with first class honours in 1921, Barfield began writing a B.Litt. thesis on ‘Poetic Diction’. In 1923 he became a follower of Anthroposophy, the religious system evolved by Rudolf Steiner whom Barfield heard lecture on 24 August 1924. He was to be involved with the Anthroposophical Society for the rest of his life. Barfield’s beliefs about poetic diction had led him to the Romantic poets and their doctrines of imagination, and then to the conclusion that Romanticism had never fulfilled itself, never been philosophically ‘justified’. Now, on reading Steiner, he found that Steiner had understood all this before him. In the Introduction to Romanticism Comes of Age (1944), which contains his debt to Steiner, he said: ‘Anthroposophy included and transcended not only my own poor stammering theory of poetry as knowledge, but the whole Romantic philosophy. It was nothing less than Romanticism grown up.’ Lewis was not in sympathy with Anthroposophy and he and Barfield engaged in a ‘Great War’ argument through the post. It is recounted in Lionel Adey’s C. S. Lewis’s ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield (1978).
During their second year at Oxford, Barfield and Cecil Harwood joined the English Folk Dancing Society, and it was through this society that Barfield met Matilda (‘Maud’) Douie, a professional dancer and producer who had worked with Gordon Craig. They married on 11 April 1923, and lived for a while in Long Crendon, where Lewis often visited them. In 1925 they moved to London to help with Barfield’s literary career. He worked for the magazine Truth, and during this time he wrote a fairy tale of the Hans Andersen kind, The Silver Trumpet (1925). This was followed by History in English Words (1926) which is not merely about the changes in the meanings of words over time but what he called ‘evolution of consciousness’. In 1928 he published a revised version of his B. Litt. thesis, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, which contains many of his leading philosophic ideas.
Unfortunately, Barfield was forced to abandon his literary career. His father lost the services of a brother in their London firm of Barfield and Barfield, and in 1929 Owen joined the firm in order to help. He received a BCL from Oxford in 1930, and spent the next 28 years as a solicitor in London. One of the most pleasant things to come out of what he called these ‘colourless’ years was a charming jeu d’esprit called This Ever Diverse Pair (1950), published under the name G.A.L. Burgeon. In the story ‘Burgeon’ is the idealistic alter ego or ‘sleeping partner’ of the practical-minded solicitor named ‘Burden’. They represent the tension between the demands of the legal profession and the need to live in the larger world of thought and letters. ‘Burden is eating me up,’ complains Burgeon in Chapter I,
my time, my wit, my memory, my ‘shaping spirit of imagination’, my whole me. Take poetry, for instance. The other evening he was so exhausted and spiritless and devoid of hope that he asked me to write a poem about his feelings. That’s the sort of thing he does–calls on me to exert the very abilities he is destroying. I produced the following quatrain for him:–
‘How I hate this bloody business,
Peddling property and strife
While the pulse of Europe falters–
How I hate this bloody life!’
In the 1940s Lewis asked Barfield to set up a charitable trust into which he could direct most of his royalties, which trust was administered by Barfield. Chapter VI of This Ever Diverse Pair is about a client named ‘Ramsden’ who is based on Lewis, and it deals in a humorous way with the charitable trust which Lewis and Barfield referred to as the ‘Agapargyry’ (love + money).
But there was colour in his private life. Over the years the Barfields adopted three children, Alexander (b. 30 January 1928), Lucy (b. 2 November 1935) who is Lewis’s godchild and to whom he dedicated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Jeffrey (b. 6 June 1940) to whom Lewis dedicated The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’. Barfield was baptized in the Church of England in 1949. Meanwhile, the friendship between Barfield and Lewis afforded them many happy times, and of Lewis’s numerous tributes to Barfield the most memorable comes from SBJ XIII:
There is a sense in which Arthur [Greeves*] and Barfield are the types of every man’s First Friend and Second Friend. The First is the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights. There is nothing to be overcome in making him your friend; he and you join like raindrops on a window. But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the antiself. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it. How can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right? He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman. When you set out to correct his heresies, you find he forsooth has decided to correct yours! And then you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night, night after night, or walking through fine country that neither gives a glance to, each learning the weight of the other’s punches, and often more like mutually respectful enemies than friends. Actually (though it never seems so at the time) you modify one another’s thought; out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge. But I think he changed me a good deal more than I him. Much of the thought which he afterward put into Poetic Diction had already become mine before that important little book appeared. It would be strange if it had not. He was of course not so learned then as he has since become; but the genius was already there.
A revolution in his life came about when he was 60. About the time of his retirement in 1959 he at last found time to write many of his best books. They include his own favourite–Saving the Appearances (1957)–as well as Worlds Apart (1963), Unancestral Voice (1965), Speaker’s Meaning (1967), What Coleridge Thought (1971), The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays (1977), and History, Guilt, and Habit (1979). Chapter VI of This Ever Diverse Pair is reprinted in a work containing nearly everything Barfield has written about Lewis, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. G.B. Tennyson (1990).
For the first two decades of this second part of his life he was a visiting scholar in many American colleges and universities. There was always a welcome for his numerous American friends at his home ‘Orchard View’ in Dartford, Kent. His wife died there on 13 February 1980. In 1986 Barfield moved to Forest Row, Sussex, and he died there on 14 December 1997, a month into his centenary.
For information about him, see Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity, ed. Shirley Sugerman (1976), a volume of essays offered to him. A very good biography is G.B. Tennyson’s ‘Owen Barfield: A Life in Thought’ in A Barfield Reader: Selections from the Writings of Owen Barfield, ed. G.B. Tennyson (1999). Another good work of biography is the introduction to A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and Fiction by Owen Barfield (1993) by the editors, Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas. Of the many studies of his writings the one he thought best is Gareth Knight’s The Magical World of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield (1990).
CAPRON, Robert (‘Oldy’ or ‘Oldie’) (1851–1911), headmaster of Wynyard School, called ‘Belsen’ in SBJ II. Capron was born in Brampton, Devon, on 29 October 1851 and received a BA and a BSc from the University of London in 1873 and 1875 respectively. From 1873 to 1878 he was a teacher at Bowdon College in Altrincham, Cheshire. He was ordained an Anglican clergyman in 1878, and was curate of Wordsley, Staffordshire. In 1881 he moved to 99 Langley Road, Watford, where he founded Wynyard School.
The school was just beginning when, in 1882, he married Ellen Barnes (1849–1909). They had three daughters, Norah, Dorothy and Eva, and a son, John Wynyard (1883–1959) who was educated at King’s College, Cambridge. The entire family helped with the school which, for a while, was successful. At its height it could accommodate 30 boarders and as many day-boys. During those early days Robert Capron was considered very successful for his teaching of the classics, and some of his boys gained scholarships to Charterhouse, Malvern, Uppingham and Rugby.
In 1896 a local boy, Ernest Benskin, enrolled at Wynyard. In an unpublished autobiography he revealed that he was there when Capron, who had already shown evidence of cruelty, went into an extreme rage, battering a pupil named ‘Punch’ Hickmott so unmercifully that the boy’s parents took legal proceedings against him in the High Court. The school began to decline from this point.
Albert Lewis* knew nothing about all this when he enrolled his elder son at Wynyard. ‘It is difficult to understand how this came about,’ wrote Warnie Lewis,* ‘having in view the careful and exhaustive enquiries which had culminated in the narrowing of the choice to three or four schools, of which Wynyard was not one’ (LP III: 33). In any event, Warnie arrived there with Mrs Lewis on 11 May 1905. In his reminiscences of his years there (LP III: 33–41) Warnie describes Capron:
A fine forehead surmounted a pair of piercing eyes of the shade of brown which is nearly black. He wore a short grey beard and moustaches, and his hair, which was plentiful, was of the same colour; his complexion was ruddy, healthy, and weather beaten. The face was marred by the nose, which was small, had the appearance of being varnished, and from which the lobe of the right nostril had at some time been removed. He was, I imagine, above middle height, and was a well built and extremely powerful man physically; I have seen him lift a boy of twelve or so from the floor by the back of his collar, and, holding him at arms length as one might a dog, proceed to refresh the unfortunate youth’s memory by applying his cane to his calves.
By the time C. S. Lewis entered Wynyard on 18 September 1908, Capron had been examined in 1906 by a brain specialist who found him mad. By this time the school had dwindled to eight boarders and about as many day-boys. Capron’s only assistants at this time were his daughters and John Wynyard Capron who was ordained in 1909. It was not long before Jack was as appalled by Capron’s cruelty as Warnie, and he wrote of this in SBJ II.
When a blast of Capron’s temper fell upon Warnie on 19 September 1908 both boys wrote to their father. Warnie said: ‘I have stood this sort of thing for three years and I cannot stand it any longer. Please let us leave at once’ (LP III: 147). Jack, in his letter of 29 September, urged his father to allow them to come home: ‘We simply cannot wait in this hole till the end of term.’ Mr Lewis, trying to be helpful, replied on 20 September 1908: ‘All schools–whether for boys or the larger school of life for men–press hardly and sorely at times. Otherwise they would not be schools. But I am sure you will face the good and the bad like a brave Christian boy, for dear, dear Mammy’s sake’ (LP III: 140).
They did not have to hold on much longer. Mrs Capron died on 1 March 1909, and Warren left to go to Malvern in July 1909. Reduced to a handful of pupils, the school began to sink. Capron wrote to Albert Lewis on 27 April 1910 to say he was ‘giving up school work’ (LP III: 206). The school closed in July 1910, Capron having been inducted into the living at Radwell on 13 June of that year. There he began flogging the choirboys and, when they tried to stop it, the churchwardens as well. He was put under restraint, certified insane, and he resigned his living in June 1911. He died of pneumonia in Camberwell House Asylum, Peckham, Kent, on 18 November 1911. His body lies with that of his wife in Watford Cemetery.
COGHILL, Nevill (1899–1980). This friend and colleague was born on 19 April 1899 at Castle Townshend, Skibbereen, County Cork, the son of Anglo-Irish Protestant gentry. Nevill’s parents were Sir Egerton Bushe Coghill, 5th Baronet, a noted amateur landscape painter, and Elizabeth Hildegarde Augusta Somerville–sister of the writer Edith Anna Oenone Somerville. He was educated at Bilton Grange and Haileybury College, after which he was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant in the trench mortar division of the Royal Artillery. He served as a gunner on the Salonika front in 1918. He went up to Exeter College, Oxford, in 1919 and read History and then English. He gained a First in English in 1923.
Coghill and Lewis began reading English together in 1922 and the first mention of Coghill occurs in Lewis’s diary (AMR) of 2 February 1923 after they had attended George Gordon’s ‘Discussion Class’: ‘He seems an enthusiastic sensible man, without nonsense, and a gentleman, much more attractive than the majority.’ It was the practice of the discussion class to keep the minutes of the meetings in verse. After Lewis read a paper about Spenser on 9 February 1923 Coghill wrote the minutes in some of the same Chaucerian verse for which he was to become famous. Describing Lewis’s paper on Spenser, he said:
Sir Lewis was ther; a good philosópher
He hade a noblé paper for to offer.
Well couthe he speken in the Greeké tongue;
And yet, his countenance was swythé yong.
Lewis was an unbeliever when he met Coghill and in SBJ XIV he explained the ‘disturbing factors in Coghill’ which threatened his atheism:
I soon had the shock of discovering that he–clearly the most intelligent and best-informed man in that class–was a Christian and a thoroughgoing supernaturalist. There were other traits that I liked but found…oddly archaic; chivalry, honour, courtesy, ‘freedom’, and ‘gentilesse’. One could imagine him fighting a duel. He spoke much ‘ribaldry’ but never ‘villeinye’.
After teaching for a while in the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, Coghill was elected a research fellow at Exeter in 1924. He became an official fellow and librarian in 1925. In 1927 he married Elspeth Nora Harley and they had a daughter, Carol. The marriage was dissolved in 1933. Over the years he developed his very considerable talents as a dramatic producer. After his production of Samson Agonistes at Exeter College in 1930, he went on to produce plays for the OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society). When he was casting Measure for Measure in 1944 he chose a talented young man from his own college to play the part of Angelo. Although baptized Richard Jenkins, he later took the name Richard Burton. He and Coghill became and remained good friends. A detailed account of Coghill’s contributions to OUDS, with a photo of him rehearsing Dr Faustus with Richard Burton, is found in Humphrey Carpenter’s O.U.D.S.: A Centenary History of the Oxford University Dramatic Society (1985).
John Wain left a delightful portrait of the Nevill Coghill in Dear Shadows (1986):
He was a big man, with a tallness that would not be remarkable now that so many people are tall, but also built on generous lines, broad-shouldered and deep-chested. His head was large, and brown hair, greying in middle life, curled and clustered on it as wiry as heather. He smiled easily, revealing somewhat battered teeth, and indeed his whole face had a slightly rough, knocked-about quality, like a chipped statue. I had one friend who used to say that he looked like one of the emperors’ heads outside the Sheldonian…But if his head was statue-like, it was a noble statue, generous in expression and bearing. His voice was deep and strong, his speech soft and gentle; and this contrast was carried through everything. He was totally courteous, a gentleman by instinct as well as by tradition…In fact, he was more endowed with grace of manner and of mind than anyone I ever met. (p. 13)
In 1957 Coghill was elected Merton Professor of English Literature. He was a scholar of Middle English literature and his translation into contemporary English of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1951) has enjoyed a wide audience. Lewis thought highly of it and he was pleased that Coghill had succeeded in making Chaucer understandable to many who would have never been able to read him. Coghill’s translation of Langland’s Piers Plowman was published as Visions from Piers Plowman in 1949, and his translation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in 1971.
Lewis and Coghill saw one another often, and Coghill attended a good many meetings of the Inklings, through which he got to know Warnie Lewis. In his essay ‘Approach to English’, in Light on C. S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (1965), Coghill wrote of those years when he and Lewis were reading English together as undergraduates.
In 1966, the year of his retirement, Coghill directed his former pupil Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Dr Faustus at the Oxford Playhouse. The following year the film, with almost the same cast, was shot in Rome, with Coghill and Burton co-directing. In 1968 he mounted a very successful musical version of The Canterbury Tales which ran for five years at the Phoenix Theatre in London. In the late 1960s Coghill went to live with his brother Sir Jocelyn Coghill at Aylburton, Gloucester. He died in Cheltenham on 6 November 1980. See To Nevill Coghill from Friends, Collected by John Lawlor and W.H. Auden (1966), John Carey’s biography in the Dictionary of National Biography, and the biography in CG.
DUNBAR OF HEMPRIGGS, Dame Maureen Daisy Helen, Baronetess (1906–97). She was born Maureen Moore in Delgany, County Wicklow, Ireland, on 19 August 1906, the daughter of Courtenay Edward Moore and Jane King Askins Moore,* and the sister of Edward Francis Courtenay ‘Paddy’ Moore*. Following her parents’ separation, her mother moved with Maureen and Paddy to Bristol in 1908. In June 1917 she and her mother took rooms in Wellington Square, Oxford, so they could be near Paddy while he was training with the Officers’ Training Corps in Keble College. She met Lewis soon after his arrival there on 7 June. He was sharing a room in Keble with her brother, and over the next few months she and her mother came to know him well. He visited their home in Bristol several times. On one of these visits she heard Lewis and Paddy promise that if one of them survived the war he would look after Lewis’s father and Paddy’s mother. They went to France soon after this. Paddy was killed in action in March 1918 and was awarded the Military Cross. Lewis wished to keep his side of the bargain, and after he came home from France and returned to Oxford they moved there to be near him.
Maureen was educated at Headington School, with Lewis providing tutorials in Greek and Latin to help her get her School Certificate. Lewis’s diary, All My Road Before Me, contains much about his life with the Moores, and the various places they lived. Maureen loved music, and had taken lessons in Bristol. After moving to Oxford, her mother did much to encourage her. On leaving Headington School she went to the Royal College of Music where she obtained her Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music in 1928. She taught music at Monmouth School for Girls from 1930 to 1933; Oxford High School from 1935 to 1940; and at Malvern College from 1957 to 1968. It was appropriate that she should marry someone as musical as she was, and on 27 August 1940 she married Leonard Blake (b. 7 October 1907) who had been Director of Music at Worksop College since 1935, and who in 1945 became Director of Music at Malvern College. They had two children, Richard Francis Blake, Lewis’s godson, born on 8 January 1945; and Eleanor Margaret Blake born on 16 November 1949.
Even after she married she did all she could to help her mother. She and her family would often change houses with Jack and Warnie Lewis, so she could look after Mrs Moore and they could have a holiday in Malvern. When Joy Lewis was very ill and in hospital during 1957, Maureen invited her two sons to spend their school holidays in Malvern.
On 4 February 1963 a distant relative, Sir George Cospatrick Duff-Sutherland-Dunbar, died. He was unmarried and Maureen Blake discovered that she was next in line, through her father’s side of the family, to a baronetcy and an estate in Caithness, Scotland. She became the 8th Baronet. She had not seen Lewis since this happened when, in July 1963, she visited him in hospital. He had not recognized others that day, and she said: ‘Jack, it is Maureen.’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘It’s Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs.’ ‘Oh, Jack,’ she said, ‘how could you remember that?’ ‘On the contrary,’ he replied, ‘How could I forget a fairy tale?’
Her inheritance of a baronetcy was more complicated than it first looked, because no one was sure a woman could inherit one. However, it came right in the end. In August 1965 Maureen was proved to be the rightful successor by the Lord Lyon, Chief of Heralds in Edinburgh. The Hempriggs Baronetcy, a ‘Nova Scotia’ one, was created in 1706 ‘to heirs whomsoever, whether male or female’. On 6 August 1965 The Times carried an article headlined ‘Woman Wins Claim to Title–Baronetess of Scotland Recognized’. ‘The court, in a judgement issued today,’ it said, ‘granted a petition brought by Mrs Maureen Daisy Helen Moore or Blake, of The Lees, Malvern, Worcestershire, and recognized her as Dame Maureen Daisy Helen Dunbar of Hempriggs, Baronetess.’
Lady Dunbar and her family spent a month each summer at Ackergill Tower, near Wick, Caithness–in the far north of Scotland. The inheritance did not bring her wealth. Indeed, it brought many responsibilities which she handled with skill and feeling. Her Scottish home also furnished her and her husband with a great deal of interest and they managed to go up north every summer. When they retired from teaching at Malvern, they moved to the small village of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire. Leonard Blake died on 1 August 1989 and Lady Dunbar died on 15 February 1997. At her death, her son became the 9th Baronet, Sir Richard Dunbar of Hempriggs.
DYSON, Henry Victor Dyson, ‘Hugo’ (1896–1975), was born on 7 April 1896 in Hove, Sussex, the son of Philip Dyson and his wife Henrietta. He was educated at Brighton College. On leaving there in 1911 he went to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. In December 1915 he was commissioned a 1st lieutenant in the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment and sent to France where he took part in the Battle of the Somme during July–August 1916, and the Battle of Arras during April 1917. It was in the Battle of Passchendaele at Ypres during October–November 1918 that Dyson was seriously wounded.
He came up to Exeter College, Oxford, in October 1919 and read English, taking a BA in 1921. He remained to write a thesis on John Ford and took a B.Litt. degree in 1924, and his MA in 1925. On completing his thesis, Dyson was offered a post as Lecturer and Tutor in English at Reading University where he taught from 1914 until 1945. During this time he was an Oxford Extension Lecturer and an Oxford examiner for St Andrew’s and Durham University. In 1925 he married Margaret Mary Bosworth Robinson (b. 26 December 1903) of Wantage. The next year Reading University achieved independence from the University of London and became the University of Reading.
Dyson was introduced to Lewis in 1930 through their mutual friend Nevill Coghill.* Lewis described their second meeting in a letter to Arthur Greeves* of 29–30 July 1930. Dyson and Coghill had dined with Lewis in Magdalen College on 29 July and remained until three o’clock in the morning: ‘Having met him once I liked him so well that I determined to get to know him better…He is a man who really loves truth: a philosopher and a religious man: who makes his critical & literary activities depend on the former–none of your damned dilettante.’
When Lewis next wrote to Greeves about Dyson it was about an even more important evening at Magdalen–19 September 1931–this time with J.R.R. Tolkien.* The ‘memorable talk’ between the three of them went on until four in the morning, and when Lewis wrote to Greeves on 1 October 1931 he said: ‘I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ–in Christianity…Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.’ The final letter in this book, that of 18 October 1931, describes in detail what happened to Lewis as a result of the long and important conversation with Dyson and Tolkien. From this time on Dyson was a valued member of the Inklings.
Lewis and the others were to see much more of this charming man when Dyson became a Fellow and Tutor of Merton College in 1945 and moved to Oxford. Warnie Lewis* had met him in 1933 and his diary provides the best description of Dyson’s wit and vivacious spirits. He is, he wrote on 18 February 1933, ‘a man who gives the impression of being made of quick silver: he pours himself into a room on a cataract of words and gestures, and you are caught up in the stream–but after the first plunge, it is exhilarating’ (BF). There is much evidence of this ‘cataract of words’ in the book he wrote with J.E. Butt, Augustans and Romantics 1689–1830 (1940). Jack wrote to Warnie on 3 March 1940 about reading the book in proof. ‘It is, as one would expect,’ he said, ‘almost too bright, but some of the sparks are admirable.’
Dyson shared Warnie’s disappointment in Jack’s choice of Mrs Janie Moore* as his companion. On 8 August 1946 Warnie dined with Hugo Dyson in Merton, and that night he wrote in his diary: ‘He was in high spirits when I met him, and his spirits rose steadily for the rest of the evening. I was more than ever struck with his amazing knowing of Shakespeare; I don’t suppose there is a man in Oxford–with the possible exception of [C.T.] Onions–who can quote so happily, e.g. tonight, apropos of J[ack]: “O cursed spite that gave thee to the Moor”: poor [Jack’s] whole catastrophe epitomised in nine words!’
Dyson retired from Merton in 1963 and he and his wife moved to a house in Sandfield Road, Headington. His works include Pope (1933), ‘“The Old Cumberland Beggar” and the Wordsworthian Unities’ in Essays on the Eighteenth Century Presented to David Nichol Smith (1945), and The Emergence of Shakespeare’s Tragedy (1950). Patrick Garland, the producer, had been one of his pupils, and at his instigation Dyson gave several television talks on Shakespeare for the BBC as well as introducing Garland’s television series Famous Gossips. In 1965 he made an appearance in John Schlesinger’s film Darling, which starred Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde. He died on 6 June 1975, and his beloved Margaret died 27 May 1993. They are buried in a single grave in the cemetery of St Cross Church, Oxford. See Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings (1978).
The Ewart Family. The head of this Belfast family was Sir William Quartus Ewart (1844–1919) who was born on 14 June 1844, the eldest son of Sir William Ewart, MP, the 1st Baronet. After taking a degree from Trinity College, Dublin, he went to work in the family firm of Wm. Ewart & Son Ltd., Flax Spinners and Linen Manufacturers. In 1876 he married Mary Heard (1849–1929), the eldest daughter of Robert Heard JP of Pallas-town, Kinsdale, Co. Cork. Mary Heard was the niece of C. S. Lewis’s maternal grandmother, Mrs Mary Warren Hamilton (see The Hamilton Family*). Sir William and Lady Ewart were the first cousins of Flora Lewis,* and they are the relatives Lewis refers to as ‘Cousin Quartus’ and ‘Cousin Mary’ in SBJ III.
The Ewart family lived in Strandtown, very near the Lewises, in a house called ‘Glenmachan’–it is referred to in Surprised by Joy as ‘Mountbracken’. Lewis wrote in SBJ III:
Lady E. was my mother’s first cousin and perhaps my mother’s dearest friend, and it was no doubt for my mother’s sake that she took upon herself the heroic work of civilizing my brother and me…Sir W. (‘Cousin Quartus’) was…gracious, childlike, deeply and religiously humble, and abounding in charity. No man could feel more fully his responsibility to descendants. He had a good deal of boyish gaiety about him; at the same time I always felt that the conception of duty dominated his life. His stately figure, his grey beard, and his strikingly handsome profile make up one of the most venerable images of my memory.
Warnie Lewis also wrote of the Ewarts, and in LP III: 252 he said of Sir William:
My father once summed up his character in four words–‘A great Christian Gentleman’. He had the Christian ideal that wealth is a trust, and his disbursements were never the mere largess of a rich man who chooses to avoid the momentary discomfort which the refusal of alms entails…Children loved him, and he was at his best in their company. His love of children knew no restriction of race, class or creed…He found his chief conversation in simple tales of his own town and countryside, and in stories of other lands gathered from the accounts of various missionaries; he had a keen relish for any story illustrative of the shrewd pawky humour of Ulster.
Of Lady Ewart he wrote (LP III: 253):
Tranquillity was her outstanding characteristic, and this quality, engrafted on the easy gracious good breeding of the old fashioned southern Irish aristocrat, made her in her middle and later years a perfect mistress of her table and drawing room, and a very loveable old lady. Her mere presence in a room diffused something of the quiet charm of a still day in autumn.
The Ewarts had five children: (1) Robert Heard Ewart (1879–1939), who succeeded to the baronetcy after his father; (2) Charles Gordon Ewart (1885–1936), who married Lily Greeves, the sister of Arthur Greeves;* (3) Hope Ewart (1882–1934) who in 1911 married George Harding and moved to Dublin; (4) Kelso ‘Kelsie’ Ewart (1886–1966), who lived near Glenmachan all her life; (5) Gundreda ‘Gunny’ Ewart (1888–1978) who married John Forrest in 1927.
Describing the Ewart sisters in SBJ III, Lewis said:
It was the three daughters whom we knew best. All three were ‘grownup’ but in fact much nearer to us in age than any other grown-ups we knew, and all three were strikingly handsome. H., the eldest and the gravest, was a Juno, a dark queen who at certain moments looked like a Jewess. K. was more like a Valkyrie (though all, I think, were good horsewomen) with her father’s profile. There was in her face something of the delicate fierceness of a thoroughbred horse, an indignant fineness of nostril, the possibility of an excellent disdain. She had what the vanity of my own sex calls a ‘masculine’ honesty; no man ever was a truer friend. As for the youngest, G., I can only say that she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, perfect in shape and colour and voice and every movement–but who can describe beauty?
Warnie added to their portraits as well. Of Hope he said:
She was a handsome woman of a dark, almost Italian type, with an air of dignity which she acquired early in life…She was very near to the Edwardian ideal of the beautiful woman…It was she who gave to Glenmachan an infusion of the larger world which lay outside Belfast and Ireland. She inherited and combined in herself that thoughtfulness and charm which she found in each of her parents…She was the best of good company, even tempered and radiating a cheerful common sense serenity in whatever company she found herself. Her marriage began the break-up of Glenmachan which was never quite the same house again after she left it. (LP III: 256)
Of Kelsie he wrote:
Kelsie was the least intelligent and most energetic member of the household…She had less pretensions to beauty than her sisters, but there was an open air freshness about her which supplied its place. The war was the great event of her life: at the first opportunity she joined the corps of women car drivers known as the ‘Fannys’, and went to Aldershot where she so enjoyed her experiences that for ever afterwards her conversation was liberally sprinkled with anecdotes of her army days. (LP III: 256–7)
And of Gundreda he said:
Gundreda was the most beautiful woman I ever saw: she had masses of red gold hair, and the glinting brown eyes and perfect complexion which so often goes with such a colouring…She had a radiant and infectious almost childlike gaiety which was always bubbling over into delighted and delightful laughter. She possessed in a supreme degree the Ulster capacity for extracting amusement from the dialect and idiom of her own countryside, and to hear her frequent imitations of the broad Co. Down accent was a joy. (LP III: 257)
GREEVES, Joseph Arthur (1895–1966), was born in Belfast on 27 August 1895, the youngest of five children born to Joseph Malcomson Greeves (1858–1925) and Mary Margretta Gribbon (1861–1949) of Brooklyn, New York. Their home, ‘Bernagh’, was directly across the road from ‘Little Lea’, where the Lewis family lived. Arthur’s father was the director of J. & T.M. Greeves, Ltd., flax spinners. The family had traditionally been members of the Society of Friends, but had converted to the Plymouth Brethren in 1830. Arthur’s only formal education came from his years at Campbell College, Belfast, between 1906 and 1912. He enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1921 and left with a Certificate in 1923. For years he had tried to get to know Jack and Warnie Lewis, but without success. Then came their first real meeting in April 1914. ‘I had been so far from thinking such a friend possible,’ Lewis wrote in SBJ VIII, ‘that I had never even longed for one; no more than I longed to be King of England.’
Their correspondence, which began in 1914, lasted half a century. There seems to be almost nothing that Lewis felt unable to mention to Arthur. When Albert Lewis* died in 1929 Jack found a home at ‘Bernagh’ or wherever Arthur was living. It was during a summer holiday at ‘Bernagh’ in 1932 that he wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress. Lewis seems not to have preserved many of Arthur’s letters; but Arthur saved nearly all of Lewis’s and they were published as They Stand Together (1979). During the compilation of the Lewis Papers in 1933–5 Warnie Lewis contributed a portrait of Arthur (IV: 181–2) in which he said:
His circumstances have been such that he has never been compelled to face the issues of life, to know it as it is, to gauge the degree of toleration which the community owes to the individual and the individual to the community. I do not here refer to the fact that he has never had to earn his living, but mean that with a child’s liking for being liked he has the child’s distress at the obtuseness of the grown ups who cannot see that if only everyone would always do as he wants them to do, the world would be a very delightful place to live in.
Jack ‘felt obliged to supplement’ this portrait with something from his own pen (LP X: 218–20), and he said of his friend:
Arthur was the youngest son of a doting mother and a harsh father, two evils whereof each increased the other. The mother soothed him the more, to compensate for the father’s harshness, and the father became harsher to counteract the ill effects of the mother’s indulgence. Both thus conspired to aggravate a tendency…towards self pity…It can easily be imagined how such a child grew up: but who could have foretold that he would be neither a liar nor a tale bearer, neither a coward nor a misanthrope?
He was the frankest of men. Many of the most ludicrous episodes which could be told against him, turn on his failure to acquire that ‘visor to the human face’ which such a training usually teaches a man to wear. He was the most faithful of friends, and carried the innumerable secrets of my own furtive and ignoble adolescence locked in a silence which is not commonly thought effeminate. Under illness or inconvenience he was impatient–a loud and violent, but not a lengthy grumbler: but danger left him unmoved…
Until I met him, and during my frequent absences, his position was much the same as that of an imaginative boy in one of our public schools. Yet he never showed any inclination to revenge himself after the fashion so familiar among our modern intelligentsia. He continued to feel–indeed he taught me to endeavour to feel with him–at once a human affection and a rich aesthetic relish for his antediluvian aunts, his mill-owning uncles, his mother’s servants, the postman on our roads, and the cottagers whom we met in our walks. What he called the ‘Homely’ was the natural food both of his heart and his imagination. A bright hearth seen through an open door as we passed, a train of ducks following a brawny farmer’s wife, a drill of cabbages in a suburban garden–these were things that never failed to move him, even to an ecstasy, and he never found them incompatible with his admiration for Proust, or Wyndham Lewis, or Picasso. He was completely unworldly. He never in his life read an ‘advanced’ book or imitated a ‘modern’ painter because he felt that he could thus become a superior being. The motive was always either his genuine pleasure in them, or else the advice of ill-chosen friends. For Arthur was both humble and unstable. He could be persuaded to read, or at least begin, any book: to adopt (for a time) any canons of taste. The last speaker was always right to him. But all these fluctuations went on over a fundamental constancy: to the charm of the ‘homely’ he was never untrue, and if he was easily drawn into the follies of any and every coterie, he could not, by any process, be infected with its pride.
During the earlier years of our acquaintance he was (as always) a Christian, and I was an atheist. But though (God forgive me) I bombarded him with all the thin artillery of a seventeen year old rationalist, I never made any impression on his faith–a faith both vague and confused, and in some ways too indulgent to our common weaknesses, but inexpugnable. He remains victor in that debate. It is I who have come round. The thing is symbolical of much in our joint history. He was not a clever boy, he was even a dull boy; I was a scholar. He had no ‘ideas.’ I bubbled over with them. It might seem that I had much to give him, and that he had nothing to give me. But this is not the truth. I could give concepts, logic, facts, arguments, but he had feelings to offer, feelings which most mysteriously–for he was always very inarticulate–he taught me to share. Hence, in our commerce, I dealt in superficies, but he in solids. I learned charity from him and failed, for all my efforts, to teach him arrogance in return…If I had to write his epitaph, I should say of him what I could say of no one else known to me–‘He despised nothing’. Contempt–if not the worst, surely the most ludicrously inappropriate of the sins that men commit–was, I believe, unknown to him. He fulfilled the Gospel precept: he ‘judged not’.
Arthur was deemed unable to work because of a bad heart and he lived on an income from the family business. He nevertheless won some recognition as a landscape painter, and was exhibited in 1936. He was a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. His painting of his friend, Forrest Reid, the novelist, is in the possession of the Royal Academical Institution, Belfast. Much of his time was spent painting in and around his beloved County Down where he spent the whole of his life. After his mother’s death in 1949 he moved to a cottage, ‘Silver Hill’, in Crawfordsburn, Co. Down, where Lewis often stayed. It was here that Arthur entertained Jack and his wife, Joy, during the summers of 1958 and 1959.
It is ironic that, while Lewis’s acceptance of thoroughgoing supernatural Christianity was due in part to Arthur’s influence, Arthur himself vacillated between religious beliefs. The original damage may have been caused by his Plymouth Brethren parents, but other forces were soon at work. He vacillated between the Church of Ireland and the Baha’i faith. Near the end of his life he settled down to what had always suited him best, Quaker services with about five elderly friends in a small meeting house in Bangor, close to ‘Silver Hill’. There he seems to have found the peace he was looking for all his life.
The last time Jack and Arthur were together was a weekend spent at The Kilns in June 1961. Jack was making plans to visit Arthur in Ireland during the summer of 1963, but a heart attack prevented this. ‘It looks as if you and I shall never meet again in this life,’ he wrote on 11 September 1963, ‘Oh, Arthur, never to see you again!’ (TST).
Among Arthur’s closest friends was Lisbeth Greeves, wife of his cousin, Ronald. A fortnight before he died he asked her to lunch with him, after which she recalls that he sensed that he would die soon. He asked her to pray with him that when his time came he would die in his sleep. On 27 August 1966 he celebrated his 71st birthday. Two days later, his cousin Lisbeth recalled, ‘he died in his sleep–just like a happy child sleeping peacefully–with a linen handkerchief over his eyes, to shade them from the early morning sun.’
The Hamilton Family. C. S. Lewis’s mother’s family can be traced back many generations. The Irish branch of her family was descended from (A) Sir James Hamilton of Finnart (d. 1540),1 who married Helen Cunningham. Their son (B) Hugh Hamilton (d. 1671) settled at Lisbane, Co. Down, in the time of King James I. His second son was (C) Alexander Hamilton (d. 1676) of Killyleath, Co. Down, who married Jean Hamilton of Belfast. Their son was (D) Alexander Hamilton (d. 1768), MP of Knock in the County of Dublin and Newtown Hamilton in the County of Armagh. He married Isabella Maxwell (b. 1729). Their eldest son was (E) the Right Reverend Hugh Hamilton (1729–1805), who was successively a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, Dean of Armagh, Bishop of Clonfert, and finally, Bishop of Ossory, which see he occupied from the time of his translation in 1799 until his death on 1 December 1805. He is buried in St Canice’s (or St Kenny’s) Cathedral in Kilkenny. He married Isabella Wood, and they had two daughters and five sons.2 (F) Their son, the Reverend Hugh Hamilton (1790–1865) of Inishmacsaint, Co. Fermanagh, married Elizabeth Staples, daughter of the Right Honourable John Staples M.P. of Lissan, Co. Tyrone.3 (The other daughter, Grace Louise Staples, married the 2nd Marquis of Ormonde.)
Hugh Hamilton’s son was (G) the Rev. Thomas Robert Hamilton (1826–1905) who was born on 28 June 1826. He took his BA degree from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1848, and in 1849 he was ordained a deacon in the Church of Ireland. In October 1850 he set off with his father and mother on the Grand Tour of Europe. Thomas kept his first diary during this tour, and it was reproduced by Warnie Lewis in LP I: 5–30. Because of ill health he undertook a voyage to India between 9 November 1852 and 6 April 1853 (this diary is reproduced in LP I: 32–64). He was ordained a priest in 1853 and during the years 1854–70 he was a chaplain in the Royal Navy, serving with the Baltic squadron of the fleet throughout the Crimean War. Mr Hamilton kept a very detailed diary during much of his period as a chaplain. It covers the periods 21 January to 20 December 1854; 19 February to 10 December 1855; 20 January to 26 June 1856; and about a month between 28 May and the end of June 1868, and it is all reproduced in LP I: 66–207.
In 1859 Thomas married Mary Warren4 (1826–1916), who was the fifth child and second daughter of Sir John Borlase Warren (1800–63). Mary’s sister, Charlotte Warren, married Robert Heard, and their daughter, Mary, married Sir William Ewart (see The Ewart Family*). Thomas and Mary Hamilton had four children: (1) Lilian Hamilton (1860–1934) who married William Suffern (d. 1913) but who never had any children. She was very fond of her nephew, Clive, and there are a number of references to her in All My Road Before Me.5 (2) Florence Augusta ‘Flora’ Hamilton (1862–1908) * who married Albert James Lewis.* (3) Hugh Cecil Waldegrave Hamilton (1864–1900) was born on 17 November 1864. After an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a regular commission in the Royal Artillery, he emigrated to Australia where he became a sheep farmer in Queensland. He became a captain in the Queensland Artillery and saw active service in the South African war. He died on 12 July 1900, and is buried at Marandellas, South Africa. Finally, there is (4) Augustus Warren Hamilton (1866–1945) who was Albert Lewis’s best friend. He was found to have an extraordinary genius for mathematics, but unfortunately his mother would not allow him to go to the university. So after leaving school he went to sea, but returned to Belfast and founded the firm of Hamilton & McMaster, marine boiler makers and engineers. In 1897 he married Anne Sargent Harley (1866–1930). They had four children,
Molly (d. 1904); Ruth (b. 1900) who married Desmond Parker; Harley; and John Borlase Hamilton (b. 1905).
HARWOOD, Alfred Cecil (1898–1975) was born on 5 January 1898 in Eckington, Derbyshire, where his father, the Rev. William Hardy Harwood, was a Nonconformist minister. He was educated at Highgate School, London, and it was there he met Owen Barfield* in 1910. On leaving school Harwood joined the Royal Warwickshires and served with the infantry as a 2nd lieutenant. He saw some active service in France. He went up to Christ Church, Oxford in Hilary Term 1919, and Barfield followed him there shortly afterwards. Harwood met Lewis through Barfield and thus began a lifelong friendship.
After taking his BA in 1921 Harwood returned with Barfield to Oxford for postgraduate studies. They lived for a time in ‘Bee Cottage’ in Beckley, where Lewis was a frequent visitor. Their great mutual interest was poetry, and Lewis valued Harwood’s criticism highly. Many of the poems Harwood wrote during these years, and which Lewis found ‘original, quaint and catchy’, are found in The Voice of Cecil Harwood, ed. Owen Barfield (1979). Another of their shared interests was the walking tour, and such was his enthusiasm for these that Lewis dubbed him ‘Lord of the Walks’.
After leaving Oxford he had a temporary job with the British Empire Exhibition in London, after which he went into publishing. Writing about this period in his life in the Anthroposophical Society’s Supplement to Members’ News Sheet (Feb. 1976), Barfield said: ‘He was at that time making a rather half-hearted attempt to turn himself into what used to be called a “young man about town,” and even the Bloomsbury set were not wholly outside his orbit. I don’t think the experiment could ever have succeeded. But there was another reason why it did not last long.’
The other ‘reason’ is related to his future wife. During his second year in Oxford, Harwood followed Owen Barfield into the English Folk Dance Society. In the summer of 1922 they joined an amateur concert party touring some Cornish towns and villages. A friend of the organizers, the Honourable Daphne Olivier, was invited and this was Harwood’s first meeting with the woman he was to marry. Daphne Olivier was the daughter of Sydney Haldane Olivier (Lord Olivier), Governor of Jamaica from 1907 to 1913. She read the Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos at Newnham College, Cambridge, and after taking her BA in 1913, she became a teacher. In August 1922 she attended a conference on ‘Spiritual Values in Education and Social Life’ held at Manchester College, Oxford, and it was here that she first heard Rudolf Steiner lecture. She became a convinced and devoted follower, and went to hear him lecture on other occasions. It was during a conference at Ilkley that a group of teachers, including Daphne Olivier, expressed their desire to found a coeducational day school in England on the basis of Dr Steiner’s educational principles and along the lines of the Waldorf school in Germany. Steiner approved the formation of a Founders’ Committee, whose job it was to find a way of bringing about such a school.
It was through Daphne Olivier that Harwood heard of Anthroposophy. He accompanied Miss Olivier to the second International Summer School held at Torquay from 9 to 23 August 1924 where Rudolf Steiner gave a course of lectures. During this conference Steiner met with the four women who wanted to found a Steiner school in London, and recommended that they would do well to have some male assistance. Pointing to Harwood, he said, ‘What about him?’
From that point Harwood was committed to Anthroposophy for the rest of his life, and he was to have a very large part to play in its dissemination in England. ‘The New School’, as it was called, was founded in January 1925 at 40 Leigham Court Road, Streatham, London, with Harwood and Miss Olivier as two of its original five teachers. On 14 August 1925 Harwood and Daphne married, and moved into a house at 51 Angles Road. Very little was known about Steiner in the country as a whole, and Harwood, who had a talent for lecturing, did much during the early years to spread the knowledge of Anthroposophy throughout the English-speaking world.
The Harwoods’ first child, John (who had Lewis as his tutor at Magdalen College), was born 31 May 1926. They were to have four more children: Lois (b. 1929); Laurence (b. 1933) who was Lewis’s godson; Mark (b. 1934); and Sylvia (b. 1937). Lewis was often a visitor to their house, and in 1947 he dedicated Miracles to Cecil and Daphne. One of the highlights of Lewis’s life was the annual walking tour with Harwood and Barfield. The best known of his tributes to Harwood is found in SBJ XIII:
Closely linked with Barfield of Wadham was his friend (and soon mine) A.C. Harwood of The House, later a pillar of Michael Hall, the Steinerite school at Kidbrooke. He was different from either of us; a wholly imperturbable man. Though poor (like most of us) and wholly without ‘prospects’, he wore the expression of a nineteenth-century gentleman with something in the funds. On a walking tour when the last light of a wet evening had just revealed some ghastly error in map-reading (probably his own) and the best hope was ‘five miles to Mudham (if we could find it) and we might get beds there’, he still wore that expression. In the heat of argument he wore it still. You would think that he, if anyone, would have been told to ‘take that look off his face’. But I don’t believe he ever was. It was no mask and came from no stupidity. He has been tried since by all the usual sorrows and anxieties. He is the sole Horatio known to me in this age of Hamlets; no ‘stop for Fortune’s finger.’6
Harwood was grieved when his beloved Daphne died in 1950. He nevertheless continued his teaching, lecturing and writing. On 1 November 1954 he married Marguerite Lundgren, the founder of the London School of Eurythmy. After his retirement Harwood remained in Forest Row, Sussex. Even during his last years, when he was afflicted with diabetes, he did not lose that remarkable imperturbability Lewis admired so much. He died on 22 December 1975. Many of his poems, stories and essays are collected in The Voice of Cecil Harwood. His other works include The Way of a Child, an Introduction to the Work of Rudolf Steiner for Children (1940), The Recovery of Man in Childhood (1958), and Shakespeare’s Prophetic Mind (1964).
JENKIN, Alfred Kenneth Hamilton (1900–80), friend from undergraduate days. He was born on 29 October 1900 at 378 Green Lane, Redruth, Cornwall, the son of Alfred Hamilton Jenkin and Amy Louisa (Keep) Jenkin. His family had lived in Redruth since the 18th century. Jenkin matriculated at University College, Oxford, in 1919 where he began reading English. This was to be an unhappy year for him. While out on a bicycle ride with his father, the latter suffered a heart attack, and Kenneth had to leave him dying at the roadside while he sought help. He nevertheless took his BA in 1922, and then stayed on to write a thesis for a B.Litt. on Richard Carew.
Lewis and Jenkin met soon after each arrived at University College in 1919. Both were members of the Martlets Society, a literary society of University College, and Lewis’s diary (AMR) is filled with details of their walks, their bicycle rides and their talk. Jenkin became a frequent visitor at the house Lewis shared with Mrs Moore, and in his diary of 25 June 1922, Lewis observed that he and Mrs Moore ‘were amused to notice again how in his conversation all roads lead to Cornwall’.
There was no keeping Jenkin from his native county. After leaving Oxford and returning to Cornwall, where he lived at St Ives, he worked as a journalist and broadcaster. Then came his many books. His first major work was The Cornish Miner: An account of his life above and underground from early times (1927), the standard work on the subject and one which established him as a historian. This was followed in the next decade by Cornish Seafarers (1932), Cornwall and the Cornish (1933), Cornish Homes and Customs (1934), and The Story of Cornwall (1934). In the 1960s he brought out his vast 16-part series on Mines and Miners of Cornwall (1961–78), running to nearly a thousand pages and embodying the results of 16 years’ research involving visits to some 2,000 Cornish mines.
Lewis met Jenkin infrequently after Cornwall had reclaimed him, but he remained indebted to Jenkin for teaching him to enjoy ‘the very quiddity of each thing’. ‘The first lifelong friend I made at Oxford,’ Lewis wrote in SBJ XIII, ‘was A.K. Hamilton Jenkin, since known for his books on Cornwall’:
He continued (what Arthur [Greeves*] had begun) my education as a seeing, listening, smelling, receptive creature. Arthur had had his preference for the Homely. But Jenkin seemed to be able to enjoy everything; even ugliness. I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge. There was no Betjemannic irony about it; only a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one’s nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was.
In 1926 Jenkin married Luned Jacobs, the daughter of the novelist W.W. Jacobs. They had two daughters, Jennifer Hamilton Heseltine (b. 1929) and Honor Bronwen Goldsmid (b. 1930). The marriage was dissolved about 1934. During the Second World War Jenkin met Elizabeth Lenton (née Le Sueur) at Mullion Cove Hotel, where she was managing director. They married in 1948, and together managed the Poldu Hotel, Mullion, whilst Jenkin also continued his research into News from Cornwall (1951). In 1954 they went to live in the family home in Redruth, ‘Trewirgie House’, where his family had been since 1770. One of the early occupants of this house had been his great-great-grandfather, William Jenkin, who became in later life steward to the Lanhydrock family estates. Elizabeth died in 1977.
Jenkin assisted in the formation of Old Cornwall societies, and he was elected President of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies in 1959–60. In 1962 he became the Federation’s first Life Vice-President. At the Gorsedd of Cornwall in 1978 he was presented with a medal, most appropriately struck in tin, which commemorated the fact that he was one of only two living Bards who had been initiated by Henry Jenner at the first Gorsedd in 1928. He took the bardic name of Lef Stenoryon–‘Voice of the Tinners’. That same year he was awarded a D.Litt. by Exeter University.
Jenkin was largely responsible for setting up the Cornwall County Record Office in Truro, one of the finest in the country. When he died on 20 August 1980 he left his printed books and pamphlets to the Redruth public library and his historical notes, documents, photos, maps and MSS to the County Record Office in Truro.
KIRKPATRICK, William Thompson ‘The Great Knock’ (1848–1921), was headmaster of Lurgan College, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, 1876–99. Albert Lewis* had been his pupil at Lurgan between 1877 and 1879, and W. H. Lewis* and C. S. Lewis were tutored by him. Chapter IX of SBJ is devoted to this extraordinary man, and he is the model for MacPhee in The Dark Tower and That Hideous Strength. He was born in the little townland of Carrickmaddyroe, Boardmills, Co. Down, on 10 January 1848, the second child of James Kirkpatrick and his wife Sarah Thompson. He was baptized in Boardmills’ First Presbyterian Church on 24 February 1848. His sister, Anne Mussen Kirkpatrick, was born on 8 December 1845. Carrickmaddyroe is located approximately 20 miles south of Belfast, between Carryduff and Dromara. William Thompson Kirkpatrick was named after his grandfather, William Kirkpatrick (1766–1848) who is buried with his wife Mary Blackley (1766–1849) in Boardmills First Presbyterian Graveyard.
The family was living at 21 Eliza Street, Belfast, when Kirkpatrick matriculated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institute, a liberal Presbyterian boys’ school, in 1862. From there he went to Queen’s College, Belfast (now Queen’s University) where he graduated in July 1868 with first class honours in English, History and Metaphysics. He wrote the English Prize essay under the nom-de-plume ‘Tamberlaine’. That same year he was awarded a Double Gold Medal by the Royal University of Ireland. He took his MA from Queen’s College in 1870.
Kirkpatrick became assistant master in the English department of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in 1868, and he remained there for eight years. The same year, 1868, Kirkpatrick entered the Assembly’s College (the Presbyterian seminary in Belfast) and spent the normal three years in theological studies for ordination in the Irish Presbyterian Church. He took classes in Christian Ethics, Oriental Languages, Biblical Criticism, Ecclesiastical History and Rhetoric. Mr Kirkpatrick became a licentiate–i.e. he fulfilled the Church’s academic and other demands for ordinands. But he was never ordained and appears in the records of the General Assembly as a licentiate under the care of the Belfast Presbytery for ten years from 1871 to 1880.
Mr Kirkpatrick excelled as a teacher. The Lewises were not the only ones to be impressed by him. Robert Millar Jones, who was Mr Kirkpatrick’s student from 1876–9, wrote:
No boy and no man could be in his company for even a very short time without being impressed by the fact that he was in the presence of a man of unusual mental power and grasp, of an overmastering influence on the mind, and of an intellectual honesty and vigour before which pretence and make-believe were dissipated like smoke before a strong wind. None who knew him could be surprised that it was he who subsequently made Lurgan College for many years one of the most remarkable and successful schools in Ireland. He became an almost incomparable teacher, and under him the boys swept on to victory over their work and to mastery of their subjects and of themselves. His pistol never missed fire; but he gave you the impression that, if it did, as Goldsmith said of Johnson, you would be knocked down by the butt-end.7
In 1876 Kirkpatrick became headmaster of Lurgan College, Co. Armagh, where he remained until his retirement in 1899. Lurgan College was founded in 1873 on the endowment of Samuel Watts who had extensive interests in brewing and tobacco. When he died in 1850 he left almost £10,000 to endow an ‘English, Classical and Agricultural School of boys’ in Lurgan. Watts’s will is remarkable in that it laid down that no clergyman, or person in holy orders, could have any part in the teaching or the management of the school. Besides this, it prohibited any religious instruction during the hours normally laid down for school lessons. These provisions have always been seen as controversial. It is suggested, however, that it was Watts’s intention to establish a school for older boys that would be on the same foundation as those National Schools envisaged by the Government in the 1830s, and which combined secular and separate religious instruction. Mr Kirkpatrick had applied for the position as headmaster of Lurgan College in 1873, but the position was given to Edward Vaughan Boulger. When Boulger left Lurgan in December 1875, Mr Kirkpatrick succeeded him. Whatever Mr Kirkpatrick’s beliefs were by this time, and he seems to have become an agnostic, this second time he applied he took pains to prove that he was not ‘in holy orders’. Believer or not, Mr Kirkpatrick insisted that religious instruction be given to the boarders at Lurgan College, and he attended the local Presbyterian church every Sunday with the Presbyterian boarders. Mr Kirkpatrick had brought his sister Anne with him to Lurgan and she helped with the management of the boarders.
Mr Kirkpatrick was a very successful headmaster of Lurgan College. There were 16 pupils when he arrived in 1876, and when Albert Lewis was there he would have witnessed a considerable expansion because in only four years Mr Kirkpatrick had built it up to over 60. Besides expanding the college, high academic records also marked Mr Kirkpatrick’s tenure of office. By the late 1880s Lurgan College was one of the top schools in Ireland.
On 15 July 1881 Mr Kirkpatrick married Louisa Ashmore Smyth of 81 Pembroke Road, Dublin, in St Bartholomew’s Church, Dublin. Louisa was the daughter of George Smyth, a stockbroker. Two days earlier, on 13 July, Anne Kirkpatrick had married a former assistant at Lurgan, Alexander Stewart Mitchell, in St Anne’s Church, Belfast. W.T. Kirkpatrick’s only child, George Louis, was born on 23 May 1882 and educated at Charterhouse from 1896 to 1899.
Lewis said of Mr Kirkpatrick in SBJ IX: ‘He had been a Presbyterian and was now an Atheist…I hasten to add that he was a “Rationalist” of the old, high and dry nineteenth-century type. For Atheism has come down in the world since those days, and mixed itself with politics and learned to dabble in dirt.’ As a licentiate of the Presbyterian Church, who preached on a number of occasions, Mr Kirkpatrick almost certainly entertained the ambition of becoming a minister. What led to his loss of faith? The Royal Belfast Academical Institution was a haven of liberalism when he was there, and it may be that caught, as it were, between the liberalism of the Institution and the dogmatism of the Presbyterian Church as a whole, he lost his faith.
Following his retirement in 1899 Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick went to live in ‘Sharston House’, Northenden, so they could be near their son Louis who was articled to the electrical engineers Browett, Lindley & Co., Engine Makers of Patricroft, Manchester. Later, while Louis was in Berlin gaining experience with electric tramways, the Kirkpatricks moved to ‘Gastons’, Great Bookham, Surrey, where Mr Kirkpatrick took private pupils and where they spent the rest of their lives.
Albert Lewis had been acting as Mr Kirkpatrick’s solicitor since he qualified, and it was natural that he ask him to tutor Warnie and Jack. This turned out to be yet another great success for Mr Kirkpatrick because, not only did he like them very much, but they benefited greatly from being taught by him. A few weeks after Jack arrived at Bookham, Mr Kirkpatrick wrote to Albert on 2 October 1914 saying:
First, I should say, he has the literary temperament in a very marked degree. I look upon this as in the main an inherited quality, and I am the more convinced of this view from the very obvious fact of his physical resemblance to you. When I first saw him at the station I had no hesitation in addressing him. It was as though I was looking at yourself once more in the old days at Lurgan. He has also your good temper and vivacity. These are valuable qualities, and they mean much, both intellectually and morally. (LP IV: 223)
A little later (25 November 1914) he said:
Clive is altogether an exceptional boy. The maturity of his literary judgements is remarkable, he follows his own instinct and is not to be imposed upon by the mere weight of authority. In literary power he is outside the range of ordinary schoolboys altogether, and it would be unfair to herd him with ‘Narrow foreheads vacant of his glorious gains’. (LP IV: 250) .
Mr Kirkpatrick had imagined that his best years were behind him when he retired from Lurgan. From another point of view, and in terms of all the good that came from it, one could say his best years began in 1913 with the arrival of Warnie, and then Jack. Besides learning from this wonderful old man, the whole family loved him dearly, and they were grieved when they learned of his death on 22 March 1921.
Mrs Kirkpatrick lived until 1933. Louis, who was married but had no children, was general manager of Bruce Peebles & Co. (Engineers) in Edinburgh from 1932 until his death in 1943. On Mr Kirkpatrick’s years at Lurgan College, see ‘A History of Lurgan College, Part II–Consolidation 1876–1899’ by J.I. Wilson in Ulula (Lurgan College School Magazine)(1977), pp. 67–74.
LEWIS, Albert James (1863–1929), father of C. S. Lewis and W. H. Lewis*, was born on 23 August 1863 in Cork. He was one of six children born to Richard Lewis (see The Lewis Family*) and his wife Martha Gee who had emigrated to Ireland from Wales. In 1868 the family moved to Belfast, where his father became a partner in MacIlwaine and Lewis, Boiler Makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders.
Albert attended the District Model National School, after which he spent the years 1877 to 1879 at Lurgan College, in Lurgan, County Armagh. The headmaster was W.T. Kirkpatrick,* who was to become a lifelong friend. On 9 August 1880 Albert was articled to the law firm of Maclean, Boyle and Maclean in Dublin. His first love was always the law, but he was devoted as well to English literature and the liturgy of the Church of Ireland. In 1881 he was elected a member of the Belmont Literary Society.
After qualifying as a solicitor on 10 June 1885 he set up a practice of his own at 83 Royal Avenue, Belfast. Over the years he held a number of important legal appointments in connection with various companies and public bodies, the most important of which was the position of police court prosecuting solicitor for the Belfast Corporation. He was as well solicitor for the Belfast City Council, the Belfast and County Down Railway, the Belfast Harbour Commissioners, the Post Office, the Ministry of Labour, and the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Albert was a political speaker of considerable importance for the Conservative Party.
The battle which seemed hardest for him was that of winning the love of Florence Augusta ‘Flora’ Hamilton,* daughter of the Rev. Thomas Robert Hamilton (1826–1905), rector of his parish church. The Lewis family had been parishioners of St Mark’s, Dundela, since Thomas Hamilton arrived there and assisted with its founding in 1874. Albert tried to get to know Flora in 1885, but she was cool towards him. He nevertheless persisted and proposed in September 1886. She replied that she ‘had nothing but friendship to give’ (LP II: 152). Albert turned to corresponding about literary subjects, and in the end they became engaged in 1893 and were married in St Mark’s on 29 August 1894.
It was an exceptionally happy marriage, Flora’s cheerful and tranquil affection being exactly the right complement to Albert’s sentimental, passionate and rhetorical nature. Their first home was one of two semidetached houses named Dundela Villas, now covered by Dundela Flats, 47 Dundela Avenue, Belfast. Their first son, Warren Hamilton ‘Warnie’ Lewis* was born at Dundela Villas in 1895, and Clive Staples ‘Jack’ Lewis on 29 November 1898. As he became more prosperous Albert had a new house built for his family, ‘Little Lea’, 76 Circular Road, where they moved in 1905. Theirs was a very happy home until the winter of 1907–8 when Flora was discovered to have cancer. Albert never recovered from her death on 23 August 1908.
With the loss of their mother, Warnie and Jack felt smothered by Albert’s love, and Little Lea was never a very happy home to them thereafter. Albert nevertheless did the best he knew, and he never stopped trying. Not having Flora to protect him from excess, he spent most of his time in his law office. When he did relax it was usually with Flora’s brother, Augustus (‘Gussie’), who was his best friend. He read widely and he was three times churchwarden at St Mark’s as well as the church’s legal adviser.
In his portrait of his father, Warnie said:
He preserved throughout his life a high and scrupulous standard of honour. I have heard his managing clerk relate that not once, but many times, he has seen Albert throw open the door of the inner office and hustle out a would be client with the words, ‘In fact, you want to make use of my legal knowledge to help you to commit a swindle! Get out of this!’ And I speak from personal knowledge of the man when I say that the latter sentence, delivered with all the force of his formidable personality, had the effect of a kick from a heavy boot…In appearance he was of middle height, well built, and of a commanding presence: his hair, which was black and naturally lustrous, he wore parted at the side: a fine forehead and heavy brows covered a pair of penetrating dark brown eyes: the mouth was concealed by a strong moustache; the chin was firm. In his whole bearing there was an air of authority, heightened by the timbre of his voice, which was strong and resonant. Both women and men considered him good looking. As the years mellowed him, his appearance was improved by the elimination of a sullen, almost sulky air which he had in middle life. He was proud of his appearance, and as sensitive on the score of his age, which he would never disclose, as any fading spinster. Amongst his idiosyncrasies was an almost childish resentment of bodily pain: a corn loomed larger in his horizon than bankruptcy, and a headache was a family disaster: but when the end came, he died bravely and without murmuring. (LP II: 66–7)
Albert was not a wealthy man, but he nevertheless provided for all his younger son’s undergraduate years at Oxford and until he had a job of his own. His interest in his parish church never flagged, but his greatest natural consolation came from his work as a solicitor. He continued at his practice until his death on 25 September 1929.
There is a short contemporary biography (and photograph) of him in Robert M. Young’s Belfast and the Province of Ulster in the 20th Century (Brighton, 1909), p. 520. His vast correspondence with his sons and Mr Kirkpatrick is found in the Lewis Papers. Over the years Lewis and Warren preserved 100 of their father’s dicta which they copied into a notebook entitled ‘Pudaita Pie’ after Albert’s ‘low’ Irish pronunciation of ‘potato’. Many of the sayings later went into Surprised by Joy. The manuscript of ‘Pudaita Pie’ is in Wheaton College. A photograph of the portrait of Albert painted by A.R. Baker in 1917 is found in Walter Hooper’s ‘The Lewis That Stayed Behind’, in the Magdalen College Record (1995). A longer biography is found in CG.
LEWIS, Florence Augusta ‘Flora’ (1862–1908), mother of Warren Hamilton Lewis* and C. S. Lewis, was one of two daughters and two sons born to the Rev. Thomas Robert Hamilton and Mary Warren Hamilton. At the time of her birth on 18 May 1862 in Queenstown, County Cork, her father was a chaplain with the Royal Navy. During 1870 to 1874 the family lived in Rome where Thomas Hamilton was chaplain of Holy Trinity Church.
From Rome the Hamiltons moved to Belfast where Flora’s father was rector of St Mark’s, Dundela, from 1874 until 1900. Flora attended classes at the Methodist College, Belfast, in the sessions 1881–2, 1883–4 and 1884–5. At the same time that she was going to the Methodist College she was attending Queen’s University, Belfast (then the Royal University of Ireland), where she performed brilliantly. She took a first degree in 1880, and in her second examinations in 1881 she passed with first class honours in Geometry and Algebra. In 1885 she passed the second university examination with first class honours in Logic and second class honours in Mathematics, and took a BA in 1886.
Flora had known Albert Lewis* and his family since the Hamiltons arrived in Belfast, but it was years before anything approaching intimacy came about. Albert may have thought it best to save serious matters until he had qualified as a solicitor in 1885. When he proposed to her in 1886 she had already turned down his brother, William, and he seems to have understood this as increasing his own chance. However, in her reply of 21 September 1886 Flora said ‘I always thought you knew that I had nothing but friendship to give you’ (LP II: 152). She really did want Albert as a friend, and, indeed, seemed to value all friendships highly.
Their first shared interest was literature. Flora had a story, ‘The Princess Rosetta’, published in The Household Journal of London. Albert said at once that he hoped that ‘to the collegiate honours’ Strandtown had already gained through Flora, ‘will be added the higher distinction of producing a great novelist’. Flora presented him with the manuscript of the story, but for whatever reason it has not survived, and no copies of The Household Journal containing Flora’s story, nor any of the other stories she wrote, can be traced. Flora and Albert exchanged many letters, but only Flora’s have survived.
What has, however, survived in the Lewis Papers is a burlesque sermon she wrote sometime before she was married. Her father had a curate, Mr Palmer, in 1892, and this cheerful piece may be a parody of his style of preaching–or that of her father! Flora’s ‘Modern Sermon’ as she called it, begins:
Brethren, the words of the text are:
‘Old Mother Hubbard, she went to the cupboard
To get her poor dog a bone.
But when she got there, the cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog got none.’
Mother Hubbard, you see, was old; there being no mention of others, we may presume she was lone, a widow–a friendless, old, solitary widow. Yet did she despair? Did she sit down and weep, or read a novel, or wring her hands? No. She went to the cupboard, and here observe, she WENT to the cupboard, she did not hop or skip or run or jump, or use any other peripatetic artifice; she solely and merely WENT to the cupboard.
We have seen that she was old and lonely, and we now see that she was poor. For, mark, the words, THE cupboard; not ‘one of the cupboards’, or the ‘right hand cupboard’ or the ‘left hand cupboard’ or the one above or the one below, but just THE cupboard. The one humble little cupboard the poor widow possessed. And why did she go to the cupboard? Was it to bring forth golden goblets or glittering precious stones, or costly apparel, or feast on any other attributes of wealth? IT WAS TO GET HER POOR DOG A BONE. Not only was the widow poor, but the dog, the sole prop of her age, was poor too. We can imagine the scene. The poor dog, crouching in the corner, looking wistfully at the solitary cupboard, and the widow going to the cupboard in hope, in expectation… (LP II: 213)
Comparing the Lewises and the Hamiltons, C. S. Lewis described his father’s people as ‘sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical’, while the Hamiltons were ‘cooler’, with minds ‘critical and ironic’ (SBJ I). The 30 letters Flora wrote to Albert before they were married and the 48 she wrote afterwards (preserved in the Lewis Papers) provide evidence of this. They supply as well a clue as to where Lewis got his own clarity of thought. ‘I am not quite sure that I would like it if you only talk to me on “sensible subjects”,’ Flora wrote to Albert on 5 July 1893:
Why should it bore me to hear about your love for me? You know it does not. I like you to love me, and if your love bored me, your society would, still more, so there would be no use in your talking to me on any subject at all…Gussie [her brother] is right about our not being a demonstrative family. I don’t think we are, but do you know I really think it is better than being too demonstrative; men soon get tired of that sort of thing. (LP II: 251–2)